French Open crowd turn on Stanislas Wawrinka after shock exit

By Simon Briggs in Paris

The fans at Roland Garros have an uncompromising way of expressing themselves, and Stan Wawrinka found himself the target of a few boos as he dragged himself off Court Philippe Chatrier.

Backing up your first grand slam is never easy, but Wawrinka - the world No.3 - played with such unthinking abandon in his opening-round defeat by Guillermo Garcia-Lopez that he could have been watching the England cricket team. Where the headline-writers in Australia had enjoyed themselves with "Stan and deliver", this was more like "concession Stan".

The last man to go from one extreme in Melbourne to the other in Paris was Petr Korda, who lifted the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup in January 1998 only to fall in the first round of the French Open to Mariano Zabaleta, the world No.213.

Admittedly, Garcia-Lopez was a tough opening-round draw for Wawrinka: he stands inside the top 50 and has already beaten one top-10 player this season in Tomas Berdych. Yet he is hardly the sort of player who blows people off the court. Rather, he is one of those metronomical Spanish clay specialists who keep the ball alive for so long that they could be playing squash.

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Struggling for answers: Stanislas Wawrinka.

Photo: AP

For Wawrinka to self-combust so dramatically in this 2hr 23min match, failing even to win a game in the final set, there must have been something wrong - either with the back muscle that he strained a few days before the Rome Masters, or with the brain that has struggled to compute the change from perennial top-20 nearly man to grand slam champion. Possibly even both. Wawrinka did claim to be fit in his post-match press conference, but locker-room etiquette frowns on discussing niggling injuries in public.

"The match wasn't good at all," Wawrinka admitted after his 6-4, 5-7, 6-2, 6-0 defeat. "I was trying to find my game, trying to be aggressive. I don't have all the answers to why I didn't play so good. I need to take a few days to see why. It was only the pressure. It's a different story, a different picture for my career. I have to put the puzzle back together. Since winning a grand slam, everything is different. Today I was trying to find a solution but it was just terrible."

Earlier, another Spaniard had ended the run of James Ward, who on Friday had become the first Briton to come through the qualifying tournament at Roland Garros since John Lloyd in 1973.

Tommy Robredo has a more eye-catching record than Garcia-LÃ³pez, having reached as high as No.5 in the world at one stage, but there is one thing they have in common: they both love clay with the passion of a primary-school art class.

This was another brutal first-round draw. As Ward battled through his final qualifying round on Friday, Robredo had been practising on the main stadium court with his old mate Rafael Nadal. Yet for all those imbalances, the match turned out to be a feisty four-set tussle, as Ward took the opening set with a sequence of blazing winners before the flinty Robredo finally wore him down in four: 4-6, 6-4, 6-2, 6-4.

It might sound hollow to praise the plucky British loser, given how discredited that brand has become in tennis. And yet, no one who saw the match could deny that Ward was mixing it with an elite opponent, and holding his ground for long stretches.

Booed: Stanislas Wawrinka returns the ball.

Photo: AP

"I fought hard against one of the toughest players on clay in the world," said Ward, the world No.168. "I put him up there in the top five in the last 10 years, so I'm pleased with my efforts. Hopefully I can take this sort of form on to the next few weeks."

Robredo's style owes something to the Venus flytrap: he hangs way back in the court and leaves what look like tempting open spaces for his opponent to aim into. But the jaws of the trap have a way of closing on you as Robredo hurtles across the baseline and thumps a winning pass. Weirdly, he is almost better at striking the ball at a dead run than when standing still. The match took place in a dispiriting drizzle that forced stoppages after each of the first two sets, but Ward still had decent support from a few British travelling fans, as well as his new coach, Australian Darren Tandy.

"Everyone wants to be top 100," Ward said, "and that's obviously the first step. It's not going to happen in one week. You've got to be realistic and know that it takes a few weeks, a few months to do. But if you're consistent and winning more matches, it's going to happen eventually."

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As for the most famous Spaniard of all, Nadal opened his title defence on Court Suzanne Lenglen, the second stage of Roland Garros. Many of his supporters had objected to the scheduling - which they suggested was disrespectful - but Nadal himself seemed unconcerned as he romped to a 6-0, 6-3, 6-0 win over world No.279 Robbie Ginepri.